When comparing PlayCanvas vs Lumberyard, the Slant community recommends Lumberyard for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?”Lumberyard is ranked 18th while PlayCanvas is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose Lumberyard is:

Pros

Pro

Powerful assets pipeline

Assets and content delivery is very different on a web platform comparing to native. So PlayCanvas challenges best practices to allow developers decide how their content is delivered and in what form.

Async Assets download allows developers to load content as the app goes, instead of asking to download all assets in advance risking users to simply navigate away while staring at loading screens.Formats for 3D models and textures support covers all the popular tools. And the workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping your files right into the Assets Panel. The cloud will do the rest of the hard work optimizing and converting your files into runtime-friendly and compressed data.

Pro

Rendering engine runs on the browser

Has an advanced WebGL renderer that runs in the browser.

Pro

Real-time collaborative online editor tool

PlayCanvas has an online editor that lets you build scenes and work with other people in your team in real-time. This is all done through the web browser without having to install any additional software.

Pro

Avoids having to download lots of textures for lightmaps

Lightmaps are an efficient way to deliver lighting to your scenes for a long time. But they come with the cost of large textures. PlayCanvas offers a unique solution for a web platform, it renders lightmaps when an app is loading in runtime.

This is faster than downloading MBs of textures. And it's much more convenient: simply switch your light sources to bake, and static models to be lightmapped, and the engine will do the rest.

Pro

Friendly and active community

PlayCanvas has Feed as homepage for registered users, listing Dev Logs of other developers. This allows to socialize with other developers like yourself in a twitter-like environment.More to that, there is also an active forum, where developers help each other to solve their challenges.

Developers of PlayCanvas itself are always looking forward to chat and help the community with any problems that may arise.

Pro

Integrated physics engine

PlayCanvas lets users integrate physics in their game rather easily, using the powerful Bullet Physics Engine (ammo.js). Should also be noted that the physics engine is delivered as an optional library, so by default being disabled it does not add any extra download size to your apps.

Pro

Open source

PlayCanvas is fully open source and is under active development.

Pro

Has a free tier

Engine is free for projects under 200MB and with no more than 2 people on a team. The free tier has no engine restrictions.

Tools are totally free too. There are no special limiting features behind any paywalls, and free users have all the features as paid users.

There are no royalties associated with publishing your apps and games - you've made them, you own them.

It is free to publish to playcanvas.com as well, just by one click in Editor.

Pro

Small app size

The engine itself weighs just under 150Kb, and it's always challenged to stay small. There is no extra weight that has to be carried with your app, just your assets and scripts in a runtime-friendly compressed form.

This allows users to engage with your content in matter of seconds, and even just under a second on a good connection.

Pro

Has hot code reloading

Real-time link between your launched app and the editor allows the developer to preview and play with their scene without needing to refresh the game after every change in the code to see the updated result.

Pro

Cross-platform support

PlayCanvas lets you build games that run in mobile, desktop browsers, and native mobile apps. PlayCanvas can even make games that can run inside mobile social media and instant messenger clients like Twitter and WhatsApp.

Pro

No royalty charges and completely free

Lumberyard is free and has no royalty charges.

Pro

Free development license, including source code

Full source code for Engine Editor and every tool.

Pro

Landscape editor

Sculpting and painting tools for terrain and instanced details.Procedural generation of terrain.

Pro

In-editor 3D modeling tool for fast level prototyping

Very advanced 3D prototyping tool with many modeling features and UV mapping support available. If you want you can build any kind of fully textured static mesh without relying on external tools.

Pro

Modular system

To easy add and remove modular functionalities to a project and easy share them.Modules are called Gems and can contain code and/or assets.

Pro

Easy to create full realistic natural environments

Thanks to built in terrain , time of day, ocean and volumetric fog systems. There is also a gfx pack with various environmental meshes , cloud , particles, materials and skyboxes.

Pro

Cloud gems

Online oriented plugins composed by both client, server and administration components to easily add various online capabilities without further work (es leaderboards, login, message of the day, downloadable contents).Since version 1.7 they has been released at a steady rate.

Pro

Uses AWS cloud

Other than common aws functionality it supports game specific Game Lift for autoscaling game servers.

Pro

New Fbx Importer adds support for every software exporting in fbx

It now works for both static models and animations and support advanced setups(es lods and physics).

Pro

Roads and Rivers Tool

Built in support for roads and rivers to ease the design of rich game environments.

Pro

Flexible uber shaders with cache and hot reloading

You can modify shaders while testing the game.

Shader files are modular and annotated to setup the material editing gui and filter out mutually exclusive options. All shader permutation are compiled almost instantly from the asset processor and cached for later use.

Pro

Advanced VR support and VR Samples to bootstrap your project

Advenced stereoscopic reprojection to save rendering time.

Pro

Total Illumination v2 Realtime GIobal Illumination

Realistic looking lighting bounces.It doesn't require long offline precomputation times like other static and dynamic GI solutions based on lightmaps or other similar techniques.

Pro

Built-in Twitch support even by visual scripting

You can create games that react to keywords entered in a designated Twitch channel and let streamers to invite targeted viewers into their game sessions on demand with ease.

Pro

Very lightweight and scalable entity component system

Multiple entity contexts, reflection, serialization, replication, script binding, event bus (EBus) messaging, fully cascading prefabs (slices).Every reflected property can be fully exposed in the editor with a customizable gui control and can be animated in the built in animation tools.

Pro

Specular reflection antialiasing

Implements the most recent technique available (published in 2017) from Anton Kaplanyan.

Pro

Amazon has announced 3 in house games using it developed from Amazon Game Studios

As a proof of how much Amazon is committed to the project.The first game Breakaway (e-sport and streaming oriented fast paced MOBA) is actually in beta stage.

Pro

Cutting edge character shaders

Pro

Advanced in-game UI with 2D and 3D placing

The UI uses the entity component system so it's fully modular and easily expandable. The UI is easily skinnable and supports border scaling images (scale 9). Powerful layouting system supporting multiple screen resolutions. Being based on the entity system every property can be fully animated.

It is elegantly managed in a separate entity context so it doesn't get messed up with other kind of entities and their components like in other engines, but it's fully decoupled communicating with entities in other context on specific event buses.

Pro

Every aspect of the engine is made with scalability in mind

Multiple grain of control over any kind of engine setting and various kind of Lod systems. Settings can be grouped and applied in batch.

Pro

Cinematic multitrack tool with full featured animation editing

Pro

Virtual file system with live reload on any device

Optimized versions of assets can be streamed live to any device connected over the network.This makes possible to implement asset types that hot reloads reducing drastically the time to test new content and little changes on device.

Pro

Is the first engine to feature SpeedTree 8

Pro

Full HDR renderer path with output support for HDR tv standards

Updated renderer pipeline to leverage the full spectrum of precision, luminosity and image processing features of the latest HDR tv.

Pro

Implements the state of the art for Temporal Antialiasing from NVIDIA Research

Special iteration of Temporal AA to battle the ghosting issue omnipresent in engines using other Temporal AA techniques.

Pro

High quality free assets packs

Amazon made available a selection of triple A quality scenes filled with high quality assets.

Pro

Perforce versioning system pre-integrated with the tools

Perforce also comes with a free version for a limited number of team members.

Pro

Order independent transparencies

A must for problematic things like hair , vegetation and scenes with complex solid transparent objects(es glass of water with ice cubes).

Pro

Slices a very powerful nested prefab system with hierarchical property inheritance

Modular workflow and flexible cascaded propagation of changes.

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Cons

Con

Private projects are only available for premium users

The free tier does not support any private projects. Instead, all the code and assets will be hosted openly. While not a problem for open source games and for developers who intend to make an open source game, it can be a deal-breaker for teams who want to keep their code and assets private.

Con

No collision offset

Con

Not many tutorials

Con

Some Legacy systems are still incompatible or not fit well with the new entity component system.

At first it is common to try a feature and then understand that it is meant to work with the legacy system and not with the newest one.

Legacy systems get replaced or updated to work well with the new entity component system in every new version, but there is still some work to do.

One example for all Flow Graph visual scripting is meant for the legacy entity and Script Canvas is the visual scripting conterpart for the new entity system, but it is still not available at the moment.

Con

No source code repository with updated development branch (requests for Github support currently pending)

You need to wait up to 30 or 60 days for fixes as they are shipped with the next official release.

There is no comfortable way to submit fixes and changes to the engine as the forum is the only tool for sharing code.

Con

CryEngine with AWS plugins

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